First, I don't have time to read all this, so I don't know what has already been said 100 times. There are many things that "could" be improved, but let me go over my top choices.

1. This has been beat to death, but I believe it is critical for many of us to be able to continue to enjoy the game: Add a "No Tech Trading or Selling" option for setting up a game, or at least "no selling tech for cash" option. This is by far my number 1 choice. I would imagine that this is challenging because you likely have to tweak the AI to adapt to this.
2. You had made the AI a little better about not trading and buying tech so easily, which does help some. Tech whoring still is allowing you to play up 3-4 difficulty levels beyond that if you didn't do it. Please take one of the many suggestions for limiting what the AI will buy from you. It just seems so "broken". Before I learned to do this, I could barely win on challenging. Now painful seems painfully easy much of the time. I suppose if the AI would at least do equal whoring, it would keep up, but apparently it does not milk it like I do.
3. There is still some "funkiness" with fleets/ships being selected where you can have multiple ships in a stack, you move one of them out, yet both (or more) stacks are selected. You have to click on something else before being able to select 1 ship. You should be able to always click on a single ship, and always have only that ship selected. It often results in moving many ships when you intend to move 1.
4. There is still times when ships mysteriously loose movement.
5. If you pass for a turn on a ship, it looses its movement. Civ4 changed this so you can still go back and move that ship later. This would be a very handy feature.
6. Please display the net turn income next to the BC total on the main panel. I am very tired of having to check in the income screen every turn to check this.
7. This may be more effort than you like, but it would be great to have a line from a ship on auto-pilot to the destination. It can get difficult to remember where everything is going. It would also be great if it could figure out how many turns until the ship arrives, and display that next to the "auto-pilot".

Sorry, I did not take the time to read this entire thread, so if this is already listed, I apologize.

In SWG they had an option to set a timer, for either a specific time of day or a specific time period, i.e. 10pm or 1hr 30min.

I think this would be nice to have as I have almost been late for work on a few occasions, either due to me forgetting to set an alarm clock, or leaving my cellphone with alarm set in another room.

If this is already in game, I have not come across it yet, but I have only had it a few days.

Great game by the way.

- Cloacking and countercloacking technologies.
Ex: A ship with cloacking device mark 2 should be detected on the map by ships with with counter cloacking mk 2 and above within their sensor range. A ship with cloack mk 3 cand be detected by a ship with anti-cloack mk 2 at it's sensor range - 1.

- Ability to make patrols using waypoints. For instance i want all the ships/groups that arrive at waypoint 1 to automatically go to waypoint 2. Then i want to be able to program waypoint to to automatically redirect the ships to waypoint 3........

- Ability to tell a planet to send all it's fresh built ships to go to a certain waypoint. very usefull for starbase constructors, fleet gatherups.....

- The lights you can use to design your ships (general tab) do nothing. Thy don't blink, they don't even look like lights, they look like spheres. I would like them to look like real lights!

- Space anomalies shoould sometimes appear during gameplay. After you initially cleaned up the map there is no point in having survey vessels......

- Fleet debris should sometimes result from a large space battle. More work for that survey vessel....

- Some more drastically random actions to bring more flavor to the game like:
- a huge empire that is about to conquer the galaxy splits in two to due to civil war,
- sometimes when a new minor race appears they should not colonize just one planet but several of them and they should also bring in some heavy firepower and technology to defend themselfes.
- a plague that wipes out 90% of the population in the galaxy
- some ship types (an entire class of ships) descovers a design fault and they all decide to drop to speed 1 until you get them into a spacedock or to a starbase
- some ship (trader or such) is in need of some sor of assistance (oxygen tank failure ot something.... ) you must reach it with another starship to save it

Skip the "Do you want to upgrade this starbase?" screen and simply add a cancel button to the module selection process.

Second, since we're skipping the "Do you want to upgrade this starbase?" we won't get the annoying Yes, followed by "Sorry, no more module available".

I am done creating a technology tree if you wish to see which technologies build which ships. It will show the heirarchy and the cool stuff that comes with each techonolgy. Email me if you wish to recieve a copy Email: ozan@ee.washington.edu

If you want to rename a planet, treat it like the ship designer : don't delete the whole name if you press any key. If you only want to change the end of the name, that's rather annoying. I like to put in parenthesis what specialisation I decided for the planet, and if that planet is a capital and so and so, but only at the end of the name. The way it works, if I want to name my planet Lemur II (res), I have to re-write it entirely instead of just adding (res) at the end.

Keeping this hopefully simple, in the 'Ship Build' option and Quick Build List, I am finding the graphic for the ships are being scrambled. (the graphic 'strips' are out of order).

Easy tweaks huh?

1. I wish we didn't start the game with a survey ship. It makes unlocking the technology to build one pointless, not to mention that why would you bother building another one anyway and also there is no reason to build the "Guide Book"(can't remember the exact name) wonder. Starting with a scout as opposed to a survey ship would add a hole new strategic path for us to follow at the beggining of the game.

2. I would like to see ship ranges reduced. Even in a gigantic map I can make contact with everyone (9 players) even before the colonization phase finishes. I almost never have to use starbase as relay point to extend my range not to mention I never used life support, ever. Reduced ranges would make the early game a lot more interesting and the choices you made more important in the long run. It would also add a lot more weight to starting placement, as isolated races would actually be isolated for a while.

That's it.

In the trade screen : When you hold down the mouse over the arrow that the money will go up automatically instead of clicking it 100 times.

-Allow longer names for ships and starbases, like 50 characters; I like 'em as big as they are complex. I really hate not being able to give my starbases ridiculously unwieldy names.

-Make entering text for ship descriptions more like a word processor; I shouldn't have to press the left key 50,000 times to get into the middle of my 15 lines of description.

-More stable trade income or an indicator of median income (I don't get the X bc a month thing, since you make much more than that each week off of trade). I dislike not knowing what the most stable income level is.

-Allow queing of ship production.

-Change the Tab key so that it only selects ships that have movement points left. Cycling through every vessel you own can be a chore.

-Have the UP require military 'peacekeeping' missions, so to speak. e.g. if a major power jumps a minor race, the UP could vote to have the others deploy forces to protect them.

-Allow players to propose UP resolutions every once in a while; maybe have more infulential power get more voting time?

-Have minor races get less ridiculously good planets. Having five class 10-15 and coming upon an ackwards-bass race with a class 26 just isn't fair. (happened three times; three!)

-Allow time-limited/per-turn trading. Maybe I want to give someone my Alloy for, say, 25 turns in exchange for 1 bc per turn?

-Limit tech-trading so that you can only trade tech the other civ has the prerequesits for.

-Allow specialized treaties instead of only Alliance, such as special trade privleges, cooperative research (get a bonus when researching a tech the other knows), construction assistance, etc.

-Have experience give broader bonuses. Maybe each level provides a percentage bonus to all stats, instead of increasing just HP.

-Allow extra time while producing a ship to give it experience bonuses, to represent especially indepth training of the crew. (Could be just a little checkbox)

-Let you see an empire's tech levels and ship designs at Advanced espionage level.

-Be able to infiltrate the UP and minor races.

-Allow spending to thwart enemy infiltration.

-In the colony screen, after ordering the production of an improvement, it should select the nearest open tile.

-Allow espionage to damage enemy, eg. apply minor penalties to research or production, etc.

Only one major comment.

Colony production. When advanced structures are researched, or stolen, the game automatically upgrades the production screen to produce those newer buildings instead of the older ones. This is no good if you are just establishing a colony or rebuilding after an invasion as they can then take 100's of weeks to build.

Can a pull down box be added for each colony structure type to allow the quicker structures to get built before the more advanced ones. For example I'd like to be able to build Xeno Factories before Manufacturing centres but if that technology comes along I don't have the option.

Thanks for a really great game - I think my work suffers a bit from it

I think the tiny icons around foreign fleets is a superb and helpful suggestion, as we get arount planets. Perhaps something along the lines of:

Red dot at top: enemy fleet
Blue dot: this fleet contains a troop module
Yellow dot: presence of weapon-bearing ships (basically to tell if it's a trooper, or an escorted trooper)

Most of the above are good sugggestions, but personally I like the mini-map not recentering - a simple back-forward scroll roll sorts it, and we've all got scroll buttons, dont we?

And yeah, cursor keys should move main screen. On my comp only a small section of the sides are sensitive for scrolling, will this be extended, possibly to allow diagonal scrolling?

I rename my planets with a C, R, F etc at the start for cash, research, and factories - this makes viewing them in the colony manager section of the civ manager page easier, they're grouped into sections. May i support a prior post re planet names being treated like ship names for renaming purposes? Also the ability to scroll toe main map in the background when the 'rename planet' pop-up appears - if i set a col ship this target 10 turns ago, I dont know which part of my empire exactly it's at, and therefore what my needs are. Also a 'rename planet' option within the planet view screen would be nice, saving me from going through the 'details' screen first, and then back again.



Ta muchly.

When more than one transports are in a fleet or square, display the total amount of troops the fleet carries, just as it is displayed when you have just one in a square. Currently you must go to the manage/details screen for each individual ship to see how many they carry, and add the numbers in your head. Very clunky.

Also would be nice to see how many troops each carries in the ship list.